Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Enhancements

The data warehousing-specific support in Oracle Warehouse Builder has improved. These improvements provide smarter dimensional object operators for ETL and support for more storage types for dimensional objects.

Administrator Usability Enhancements

Oracle Warehouse Builder administration tasks are simplified and improved by multiple features in this release. Administration has been extended to support new feature areas such as heterogeneous database support and Web services integration.

Process Flow Enhancements

Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows have been enhanced to integrate with new activity types, out of the box, and to support integration of Oracle Warehouse Builder ETL and data quality with SOA solutions.

This section provides detailed descriptions of all major new features in Oracle Warehouse Builder for this release.

Advanced Find Support in Mapping Editor

The Mapping Editor has been enhanced with advanced find capabilities to help locate and constitute dates to operators, groups, and attributes in a mapping diagram, in the Available Objects tab, and in the Selected Objects tab.

This feature enhances extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) mapping developer productivity, especially on large and complex mappings and, for example, when working with complex data sources with large numbers of tables, views, or columns.

Code Template Mappings and JDBC Connectivity Support

The new Code Template-based mapping framework enables implementation of data integration techniques and patterns for integration of content from non-Oracle databases with maximum performance and flexibility.

JDBC connectivity supports a wide variety of sources. Additionally, Oracle-supplied or user-developed Code Templates can use other native data integration techniques, such as bulk unloads and loads, for maximum performance on any platform.

Enhanced Support for Flat File Imports

There are numerous improvements to support for importing flat files, including a simplified Flat File Sample Wizard, support for multi-character and hexadecimal format delimiters and enclosures, simplified support for fixed format fields, and support for bulk flat file loads into heterogeneous targets.

Flat files are frequently used for simple and high-performance data movement in ETL applications. These changes improve ETL developer productivity and provide more flexible handling of more types of flat files in more scenarios.

Enhanced Table Function Support

Oracle Warehouse Builder now has improved support for table functions, including importing metadata for existing table functions, a wizard for creating table functions from within Oracle Warehouse Builder, and better support for table functions in mappings.

Improved support simplifies using table functions for much more flexible and powerful transformations, such as user-defined aggregations, data mining sampling operators, and so on.

Expression Editing in Operator Edit Dialog

Expressions associated with operator attributes can now be entered directly into an Operator Edit Dialog or Expression Editor, rather than requiring that these expressions be entered into a property in the Property Inspector.

Developers can finish more of their work in one place when creating operators in ETL mappings, thus improving their productivity.

Extensible Platform Framework

Platform extensibility enables users to define new platforms, represent the native data types for those platforms, and create ETL mappings that manipulate that data according to the requirements of the platform.

This feature is part of the overall improved support for heterogeneous databases in this release.

Grouping and Spotlighting of Objects in Mapping Editor

You can now temporarily or permanently group objects in the Mapping Editor so that they are collapsed to a single icon. This hides complexity in mappings. Users can also spotlight a single operator, which temporarily hides all objects in the mapping except for those objects that connect directly to the operator.

These features improve productivity for developers working with complex mappings with large numbers of operators.

Improved Metadata Search and Find for Dependency Management

The Dependency Manager, which is used to browse data lineage and impact analysis information, now includes advanced metadata searching capabilities.

Users can now more easily locate specific objects in large and complex dependency graphs. This improves productivity by making it easier to find specific objects and their lineage, and discover impacts from design changes.

Java-Based (J2EE) Control Center Agent

The Control Center Agent provides a Java-based run time environment that can be installed on Oracle and non-Oracle database hosts. Heterogeneous ETL mappings and Web services-related code are deployed to the Control Center Agent, and run time audit metadata is accessible within Oracle Warehouse Builder.

The Control Center Agent provides fundamental infrastructure for the heterogeneous, Code Template-based mapping support and Web services-related features of Oracle Warehouse Builder for this release.

New JDeveloper-Style User Interface

The Oracle Warehouse Builder Design Center user interface has been updated to use the Fusion Client Platform, the same core Integrated Development Environment (IDE) platform as Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle SQL Developer.

The advantages of this user interface framework include:

More efficient and flexible use of screen real estate.

Support for opening multiple editors of the same type, for example, editing several ETL mappings in different windows.

More consistent behavior across different parts of the Oracle Warehouse Builder user interface.

This change brings the Design Center in Oracle Warehouse Builder in line with other development tools from Oracle.

Operator Comments Included in Generated PL/SQL Code

PL/SQL code generated for Oracle Warehouse Builder ETL mappings now includes detailed comments to help developers associate specific operators in a mapping with sections of the generated code.

Developers can more easily troubleshoot issues with Oracle Warehouse Builder-generated code that can only be detected when the code is deployed. This additional information enhances developer productivity.

Organizing Objects with User Folders

Users can create hierarchically nested folders to logically group related objects. Folders can be created within Oracle and non-Oracle database modules, non-Oracle database modules, application modules. User folders can be nested as necessary to organize objects further.

You can use folders to group related objects. Any object in one of the supported module types, such as a table or a mapping, can be moved into a folder.

For example, if a single database module contained tables, views, and ETL mappings for product and customer data, folders "Product" and "Customer" could be created, and the objects related to each category moved into the separate folders.

User folders can also be created to contain pluggable mappings. This allows organization of related pluggable mappings into groups.

User-created folders improve ETL developer productivity on complex projects, by making it easier to logically group and manage large numbers of objects.

Chunking for Parallelizing Large Table Updates

Chunking in Oracle Warehouse Builder automates the use of a "divide and conquer" approach to parallelize the processing of large updates. Users enable chunking for a mapping and define chunking criteria to partition the updates. Oracle Warehouse Builder generates PL/SQL code for the mapping, and at execution time, updates are divided according to chunking criteria, a pool of threads is allocated, and the chunks are processed in parallel.

Chunking avoids the need for large rollback segments. Set-based SQL statements for large updates require large rollback segments, because a single set-based statement does not perform intermediate commits.

Large updates can be performed incrementally, and if interrupted, chunks are processed do not have to be processed again. Without chunking, if a large update terminates for some reason, all processing must be repeated.

Support for OMB*Plus Activity Type In Process Flows

Process flows now support an activity type for running an OMB*Plus script.

New process flow activity types increase the breadth of user-defined activities that can be incorporated into process flows and thus orchestrated and managed as part of your overall data integration process.